The Cult of Competitiveness

James Poulos makes an important argument in Vice, that political elites have become so obsessed with economic growth that “Not only does our anxiety push us to become the kind of people least capable of launching our own personal growth plans, it encourages us to ignore the growing number of urgent issues that have nothing to do with the size of our per-capita GDP.”

To be sure, economic growth is important, and provides many benefits, including but not limited to maintaining domestic tranquility, securing our social order, improving the material living standards of almost all Americans (even if at divergent rates) and relieving us of many anxieties and burdens. Poulos doesn’t dispute the benefits of economic growth, but rather points out how an obsession with it can undermine and spoil the very things we are or should be seeking. You should read the full piece here.

There is a complementary obsession to the one he points out, though, one which interacts with the growth obsession to undermine many of the most important discussions and considerations we should be undertaking. It is the competitiveness obsession. In fact, if there is any word that runs close to “growth” as a dominant policy topic, it is its cousin “competitiveness.” Our nation needs to be more competitive with China and India on a global scale of economies and war. Our companies must be more competitive to create jobs. Our workers must be more competitive, to keep those jobs. Our schools must be more competitive in math and science, and our children must be more competitive, because haven’t you seen how long the Chinese lock their kids up in schools? When not competing with the Chinese, our kids need to compete with their peers to (for the most egregious) get into the most competitive kindergartens and grade schools that will feed them into the most competitive colleges, and graduate programs, so that they can get the most competitive internships and entry level positions at the most competitive firms. Along the way hopefully they will meet an equally competitive spouse, so that their children can start off with a competitive genome. Because you never want to let your child “fall behind,” least of all in the womb. How would they ever catch up from that? They would be doomed, or at the least screwed.

To which Poulos has a welcome reminder: “None of us are doomed. Nobody is screwed. Sure, your life might take some weird, sometimes even painful turns. You, like millions upon millions of us since the dawn of man, might experience heartache, disappointment, and tragedy.”

But the most important things in life, the most vital and electric things that enrich the human experience into something greater than anything the most competitive of Darwin’s finches could hope for, are not to be found in competition. Love and companionship, in spite of and through hardship, will not be acquired through a sperm bank sorted by SAT score. The terror and the tenderness of parental love will not be enhanced by private schools charging Ivy-League tuition. The ecstasy and the groundedness of religious devotion cannot be obtained at the expense of another. In fact, each of these can only be obtained by looking beyond the personal immediacy of competition to recognizing ourselves as in relationship, embedded in community.

It is just this community that the competitiveness cult threatens, by driving us to instrumentalize ourselves and our lives. This is perhaps made most plain in the absurdity of the conventional college admissions process, where the early education in civil society and self governance that clubs of interest and service once provided high schoolers has been transformed by their status as mandatory resumé fodder. The building of relationships can turn into “networking,” particularly in DC, where business cards are often accompanied by sheepish-to-shameful grins testifying to the mixed motives of “staying in touch.” There are reasons for this, and people feel a genuine anxiety about keeping their head above water, in many ways driven by the increasing instability of our modern times. That does not diminish, but rather it enhances, the value of Poulos’ imperative: “Let go of our sense of dependence on plans.” What we can compete for comprises only a small portion of our human goods.

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8 Responses to The Cult of Competitiveness

This should be on the minds and lips of everyone, from the most “elite” politician down to the newlyweds thinking about starting a family. Our society is pathologically flawed, and our mass delusion is more is always better. One cannot turn around, change a TV or radio channel, or pass by some new housing or commercial construction site without having more-is-always-better shoved down one’s throat. Our pace of living, our relationships of every level, are all driven by this pressure.

If I were to point to a single point of moral failure — blaming as I would without regard to any personal hypocrisy (of course) — of our spiritual governors, it is in failing to address this pressure and offer a sane balance to it. Indeed, from constant concern over membership numbers right up to the churches of prosperity and their egregiously pompous veneers, our one possible haven from those pressures have adopted them and promoted them as sane.

Life is not all light and joy. Life is not an exercise in avoiding, denying or ignoring darkness and grief, about which I too often find myself berating my New Age siblings in faith. Life is about living effectively, enjoying the fruits and knowing how to cope with the storms, droughts and plagues.

Vivir con miedo, es como vivir a medias!

A life lived in fear is a life half lived. — “Strictly Ballroom”, Baz Luhrmann and Craig Pearce (screenplay)

“God is an iron,” I said. “Did you know that?”

I turned to look at her and she was staring. She laughed experimentally, stopped when I failed to join in. “And I’m a pair of pants with a hole scorched through the ass?”

“If a person who indulges in gluttony is a glutton, and a person who commits a felony is a felon, then God is an iron.”

If for some reason bad to describe and worse to imagine you listen to the best-selling globaloney of Tho*** Fried***, we Americans in our 310 millions and growing like superannuated Flintstones Kids are all members of our nation’s Olympic Economics Team, sweating perpetually in our home and work gyms under the whistle of Coach Tom, lest in having “them” – Teh Brown/Yellow/Red/ Ones – eat “our” lunch, “we” might from a contest that never ends have to fly home daily without so much as a bronze to our collective name. The notion that none of us signed on to any Grand National Purpose in the first place, being rather preoccupied, under as many millions of decidedly non-aggregative plans as there are of us, would seem never to have occurred in the precincts of those for whom the airport lounge and an obligatory hour every two years with the remote-controlled Audioanimatronic host of Charlie Rose are two of the very Seven Pillars of Wisdom.

“The building of relationships can turn into ‘networking,’ particularly in DC”

It’s everywhere. DC may hold its own in the lists of richly-earned opprobrium, but it is neither more nor less than a hothouse company-town variation on a pathology that is national, and far more that as well, in scope. The implicit myth, widespread among populists of all stripes, of – sniff! (resumes slicing Onions) the Decadent Beltway v the Virtuous Heartland, of the Elites v the People, is self-fellating imbecile claptrap of the first water and the blood royal.

“Let go of our sense of dependence on plans.”

What – and give up Show Business?

Good grief, man, don’t you know that the friends – er, contacts – you make in higher “education” will last you a lifetime should you be so very, very unlucky? And that the major you chose at twenty will still interest you and bind you to a “career” within it when you are sixty? That the politics, religion and taste in pornography you had in your days at the campus pump will remain undisturbed until it is time for your gold-plated smartwatch and the friendly shove along the testimonial plank suspended over the shark tank outside Dear Old HQ on your last day? Don’t you know that by going to the gym religiously and tellingly so, you can prevent your death by stroke the better to ensure it by either soulless desperation or a chance brush with a rogue tractor-trailer?

“Money cannot buy you happiness, but then neither can poverty”.
Personally I think everyone should decide how much they want to be competitive versus how much they want to be relaxed. The people who write these kind of articles though are almost always from relatively pampered backgrounds, and thus have an easy time to preach to those that cannot afford such luxuries.

It’s nice to decry competitiveness, until we understand what many people are competing for. Airy-fairy platitudes about “nobody screws up” are fine until your Type 1 diabetes acts up, you go into a crisis, wind up in the ER, and then in bankruptcy court, because we are the only developed nation without national health care.

How widespread is this cult? I might have become out of touch with America, but my impression is that it’s pretty narrowly confined to certain kinds of upper-middle class people, the kind who go to Yale and write for journals such as Vice (or The American Conservative, for that matter).

Most of us are just concerned with getting by and not slipping down too much on the ladder. People who send their kids to exclusive kindergartens are as foreign and exotic to us as the Kalahari Bushmen, albeit less appealing. But we don’t write articles in magazines.

Obama cares enough to tax you to pay for contraception! Oh, I thought children were one of those things with transcendent or even infinite value. You mean we need to slaughter children so we can have free love (sex).

Beyond that any art – the top 40 trash on iTunes or the great works performed by orchestras played in museums or churches still has to be paid for. An artist who is starving isn’t that productive.

There was also that controversy about selling indulgences, or even that alms-giving remits sins (it is Lent after all).

You can only enjoy a fruit if you have produced it, exchanged something for it, or have obtained it by theft, fraud or robbery. In the case of the latter method, we have become good at rationalizing violating that commandment by proxy, as long as the proxy has some veneer of governmental legitimacy. Everyone buying things from the produce section with an EBT card as an example.

There is a balance to be struck, but we want a free lunch and cannot get one, so will accept one “other people” pay for, either geographically or in time, even if it is our yet unborn grandchildren. Not having to pay for today’s lunch lets us purchase these better things, at least if we aren’t yet overlimit on the credit card.